patrick.net

Reality says

RWSGFY,

Because your question "Wait, the Holocaust was real?" sounded like you were surprised and/or doubting that the Holocaust was real.

Jeez, are we explaining jokes now?

It was a jab at brainless morons who in one thread scream about "Nazis!" and then deny Holocaust in another.

AmericanKulak,

I agree. That's why I used the phrase "was alleged" regarding the real purpose of WW2, although the details went deeper than "British Empire fighting alone against evil." Crassus got rich by owning the fire-fighting business in Rome; he sold fire insurance, and those who did not buy his fire insurance had a high chance of having their homes catching fire; he also bought houses that were not insured and on fire, at deep discount.

The Christian "reconquista" of Spain must have also looked/felt terrible to the existing residents there. The rulers of Cordoba Caliphate and its derivative principalities were quite benign by the standards of that time. Although nominally Islamic, they were similar to today's Malaysia and Indonesia: more or less live-and-let-live places, not the fervently Sharia Law places like some of the countries in the Middleast today. Al-Andalus even had large Jewish population, very much enjoying religious freedom (after paying some taxes that the states' finance depended on; working out more like a bribe to control the rulers). By comparison, the bands coming down from the northern mountains must have looked like (what today can only be called) terrorists: they looted the cities one after another, and forced both Muslims and Jews to either convert or get kicked out; then setting up rigged courts torturing those stayed accusing them of faking conversion, in order to shake more money off from them. Essentially a (pre-run) holocaust (with a lower case h) driving most Jews to emigrate to Poland (which covered a larger area of eastern Europe at that time) to settle and later face the Holocaust some 500 years later. Without the Jewish and Muslim merchants, the new Christian Spanish state, despite two enormously lucky finds (Columbus' discovery of the Caribbean, then Conquistadors getting hold of enormous amount of gold and silver in today's Mexico and Peru), squandered all the wealth on religious wars and internal mismanagement, turning Spain into the poorest country in Western Europe. Aside from financing Columbus (and the discovery of what turned out to be the Americas despite Columbus own belief otherwise), the quality of management wasn't a whole lot better than Mugabe's Zimbabwe (what Rhodesia renamed to after kicking out the whites). It shouldn't be a surprise that those shopping for raiders to bring down the wealthy principalities (to wipe out the liabilities in the banking books) were probably looking for the most brutish bands in the mountains . . . just like bankers found and financed the most brutish Commies and Nazis in the 20th century.

I think Philip II broke the Hapsburg Family and Spain by his obsession with Counter-Reformation. I mean he lost several massive fortunes, years of extraction from the flush Silver Mines of Peru, both on the Armada and then in the Netherlands.

Philip II was described as "An intellectual, but not intelligent"

A scene from the 1970s during the largest Trade Fair in the world held annually in Bulawayo Rhodesia.

Ian Smith was a genius

Make Rhodesia Great Again

One of my neighbors in my court went on a 'Chandelier Safari' to Zimbabwe to see Victoria Falls. I would never go on one of those given the area and the history. He said going to the falls (at the juncture of a couple of African countries) wound up requiring a few visa stops and money changing due to the border crossings.

The chandelier safaris put them in big tents with all of the bwana luxury amenities of travel, but still, I think I would be spooked out, Victoria Falls or not.
OkDOGEisAmountingToSomething says

DeportLibtards says

Same kind of empty posturing as pictures of Israeli girls walking around in sun dresses and sandals with M-4s slinged over their shoulders. When the real shit hit the real fan on Oct 07 they turned out to be easy prey and were killed or kidnapped in big numbers.

Back before trigger discipline was a thing.

I had a client who was South Afrikaner and was a mercenary soldier in Rhodesia. He was scary because he radiated his death skills and talked about them, though in a non-menacing way. He said he had to leave because he 'crushed the trachea' of an abusive superior officer who was on his case leading to early retirement by fleeing.

He also had a very strange girl friend and the pair of them were so zippy and exotic, I don't know if I have ever quite run across anybody like them since. She was loaded, so I guess she liked to run with him as a bad boy.

https://x.com/Will_Tanner_1/status/1924950255176651028

The reason for our present dysfunction can be seen in the reaction to what Rhodesia PM Ian Smith once said about decolonization, and the truth of his words. He said:

“If blacks are to rule themselves, people in towns will walk on sewage until they believe it’s normal, all the gains from colonization will vanish, infrastructure will collapse, roads will be impassable, trains will kill people until they’re abandoned as an usable mode of transport, hospitals will be closed, farms will be grabbed and nothing to feed the people.”

Of course, all that came to pass. Rhodesia was a hugely successful country in every respect, particularly in the realm of preserving a unique and beautiful culture while also ensuring living standards and economic growth for blacks and whites remained on the upswing until Mugabe wrecked it. And wreck it he did, with the result that everything that was once built and once successful was wrecked. The infrastructure survived the Bush War, and was even relatively good during that war, but couldn't survive a few years of race communism.